Round 2

Dancing has a lot to do with familiarizing yourself with sensations of the body, with the internal kinesthetic sense--how your weight's aligned, tension and relaxation around joints, and the maximum potential length of your limbs to take a couple of examples. Different styles have different ways of emphasizing and expanding upon this relationship. Limon technique may be taught in skirts to understand the sensation of fabric against the body, to feel and see weight extending away from the body in a different way. It changes how you move, and how you perceive your movement. In release technique and many contemporary classes, there's an emphasis on movement performed on the floor, and you'll spend a lot of time relaxing body surfaces which usually do not bear loads into the ground, developing a real sensitivity of skin and joints to floor. And you can even take the step of abstracting it, like some improv classes do, and you're asked to interpolate improvised movement from a sensation (sun or breeze on the body, physical state induced by an image) with a concrete kinesthetic memory. The point I'm trying to get to is that under the contemporary dance paradigm, "learning" to dance means studying these kinesthetic sensations and using them to strengthen certain alignments, cultivating an exact understanding of the body and expanding its capabilities.

Pain, being a body sensation itself, plays a large role in this process of parsing and understanding kinesthetic information. It's a signal that can tell you a movement is being performed wrong, or, in some cases, that it is being performed right. I had a teacher line me up in a yoga pose a couple of months of ago and besides being absolutely positive that one of my shin bones was going to sever, the bony protrusions of my ankle joints were grinding into the ground with a force that sent sharp pain all the way up to my ears. The tears were streaming from my eyes, streaming. But when I got up from that pose there was something wild and free feeling in my lower legs. She claimed that with daily repetition, the pain goes away. Damned if I'll ever find out. Anywho, different styles place very specific stresses on the body, and until you really understand how to handle them efficiently, you're gonna hurt. Starting to dance was the most brutal for me. I talked a little bit earlier about my horribly inflexible feet and the constantly reopening wounds that resulted over the joints of my metatarsals. My knees were a mess until I learned how to support a grand plie, because I was training with SDT dancers who love to fall, rapidly and with force, in and out of this squatting position. Almost without fail, people dynamically loading weight onto the shoulder for the very first time in any variety of rolls or shoulder stands get bruises or scrapes that can last upwards of a week. Point is, you deal with it or fake the movement and do what you have to do to get through class and wait for it to heal up. The part that fascinates me is that two weeks later, when the same movement that was such an ordeal for the body pops up in a bit of choreography, you just know how to approach it. You haven't been practicing every day; you haven't been able to practice because your joint was swollen or the bruise or the cuts were just too much. But you move through it and suddenly your shoulder isn't grating so uncomfortably into the floor, suddenly your weight is more even across the surface of the foot so you don't get floor burns or blisters. We have some pretty remarkable mechanisms in place for adaptation and self-preservation, and the body doesn't forget pain.

These days in dance school I feel like, in some ways, I'm starting all over. After making my body into an instrument that didn't suffer from basic stretches and basic floor work, then one that excelled at these things, I thought I could apply the process of patience, diligence, and kinesthetic intelligence to whatever challenge and come out on the other side unscathed. Ah, pride! The next step of relating to the floor, not from the floor but from the air, is putting my body through the wringer all over again. As soon as my hip recovers, consider this the start of round 2. And oh, my knees will be mighty and my elbows will be as my hands!